IESR Environmental Economics Seminar Series 由暨南大学经济与社会研究院生态文明与环境经济学研究中心举办。讲座系列邀请环境经济学学者分享相关领域内的最新研究。

题目:  Rain follows the forest: Land use policy, climate change, and adaptation

主讲人：Charles Taylor, 哈佛大学

时间：  2023年4月12日上午9：00 – 10：30（北京时间）

举办方式：线上讲座，扫描文末二维码即可报名

主讲人简介：

Charles Taylor is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School (incoming). His research interests are in environmental economics with a focus on climate change, agriculture, land use, and ecosystem services. He often uses satellite data and remote sensing to help answer policy questions. Prior to academia, he held positions at The Earth Partners LP, a sustainable land investment company, McKinsey & Company, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He is the co-founder of Drylands Natural Resource Centre. He received a PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University in 2022 and was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley.

摘要：

Human actions can alter the local and regional climate, particularly via land use. We assess the impact of the Great Plains Shelterbelt, a large-scale forestation program in the 1930s which planted 220 million trees across six US Midwestern states. The program led to a regional increase in precipitation and decrease in temperature, with impacts persisting for several decades. The change in climate extended to adjacent unforested land up to 200km away—enabling us to directly study climate adaptation. In places facing more favorable growing conditions, crop yields increased significantly. Adaptation accounts for up to half of the yield increase, with farmers switching to more water-intensive production. This paper highlights the endogeneity risk in using spatial variation in climate trends in estimating climate damages, as well as the potential for tree planting to mitigate climate change impacts.